“Good idea.”
Twenty minutes later, he followed the directions on the GPS through a neighborhood of well-kept, modest homes. He found Peg’s house and pulled into the driveway.
“I think it might be best if you wait in the car while I go speak with the possible witness,” he said after a moment.
He had thought about it for the last few hours, remembering Peg’s words.
She looked like she had been messed up good and I sure as hell knew scared when it was staring at me across the cab of my truck.
What if Peg’s information firmly pointed the finger at Luke being somehow involved in his wife’s disappearance? For the first time since he had started pursuing the investigation seriously, Elliot found himself battling reservations.
He wanted answers, but he didn’t want to break Megan’s fragile heart.
“Why don’t you want me to come with you?”
That wasn’t it. He was startled at the humbling realization that he wanted her with him everywhere. She filled a spot he’d never realized had been hollow all these years.
“I don’t know what she’s going to tell me,” he finally said. “You may not like what you hear.”
“I want to know what she has to say, Elliot. Please.”
His instincts told him he should insist she let him question the woman alone but something made him hesitate. He didn’t know how to refuse her. She had come all this way with him. It seemed wrong to keep her out here in the vehicle alone.
Besides that, Peg might feel more comfortable with another woman along.
“You can come in, but I have to ask you to let me ask the questions.”
“Of course.”
She opened her car door. Because they had only been traveling a short distance from the service station to Peg’s house, Megan hadn’t put Cyrus back in his crate but held him on her lap. Now she set him on the ground. “What about Cyrus? I don’t feel good about leaving him in the car.”
“Bring him along,” he said.
The front door of the house opened before they even made it up the steps of the porch.
Peg McGeary didn’t match up to anybody’s stereotype of a female truck driver. She was petite, pretty, with streaky blond hair to her shoulders and an athletic frame.
“Hi there,” she greeted them with enthusiasm. “I’ve been so excited all afternoon, I could hardly focus at work.”
“Thank you very much for agreeing to speak with us on short notice,” Elliot said.
“Are you kidding? This is the most exciting thing to happen to me since...well, ever. And who’s this little cutie?” she asked with a smile for the dog.
“This is Cyrus,” Megan said. “Sorry to bring him along, but he’s been cooped up in his crate for two days.”
“My backyard is fenced. We’ve got a sweet old Lab back there. If he doesn’t mind other dogs, you’re welcome to let him off his leash to run around while we talk.”
Megan looked torn, as if she didn’t want the dog out of her sight, but she finally nodded. “He would like that. He loves making new friends.”
“Right through here. He should be good outside.” Peg led them through a kitchen with dark-stained cabinets and what looked like gourmet appliances. The kitchen smelled of caramel and chocolate, enough to make his mouth water.
“Thank you. This is very kind of you,” Megan said after Peg opened the door for her onto a nicely landscaped backyard where a black Lab, muzzle turning white, snuffled a greeting.
Peg dismissed that with a wave of her hand. “We dog lovers need to stick together.”
She ushered them back to her living room, where Elliot noticed four of his books spread out on the coffee table.
“Can I get you something?” Peg asked.
He shook his head and Megan did the same.
“Then please. Sit down,” she said. “I can’t believe it. Elliot Bailey, right here in my living room.”
Before they could sit, a giant of a man with dark hair and a big bushy beard came into the room, hovering protectively beside the woman who was probably half his size.
“You’re the FBI agent?” he asked.
Elliot reached out to shake the man’s hand. “I am. Elliot Bailey. But as I explained to Peg on the phone, I want to be clear I’m not here in any official FBI capacity. I’m looking into a case unrelated to my work at the Bureau.”
“Are you working on a book?” Peg asked. “Oh, I can’t believe I might get to be in one of your books.”
Elliot looked uncomfortable. “I’m not planning to write a book about this case either. I’m only researching to find answers. The woman was a friend of mine and I would like to know what happened to her.”
“Well, if we’re talking about the same woman, I would guess some son of a bitch beat the shit out of her and she finally got tired of it and took off.”
* * *
AT THAT BLUNT PRONOUNCEMENT, Elliot could feel Megan tense, and he cursed his own weakness. He should never have let her come into this interview. This was exactly what he had feared, that the information Peg McGeary had to offer might further implicate her brother.
It was too late now. She was here. She would never agree to go back to the car now. The only option was to get through this as quickly as possible.
“I’ll get out of your way so you can talk,” Peg’s husband said. He kissed his wife’s cheek, then gave Elliot a hard look that plainly conveyed his willingness to get rough if necessary in defense of the woman he loved. “I’ll be in the man cave if you need me.”
“Thanks, babe.”
The man touched his wife’s arm softly on his way out of the room in a gesture of support that Elliot found extraordinarily sweet, especially coming from someone who looked like he could crush small kitchen appliances with his bare hands.
They all sat down, Elliot and Megan on the sofa, Peg facing them on a matching love seat.
“Why don’t you start at the beginning,” he said after the man had left. “Tell me what you remember about that night.”
“You’re going to sign my books, right? You won’t forget?”
His face, predictably, turned hot. “Uh, sure. I’ll sign them when we’re done.”
He reached into his pocket for his digital tape recorder. “Do you mind if I record our conversation? Again, this isn’t a statement on the record. I’m not working this case in any official capacity, but I would like to have it for future reference.”
“Fine with me. Record away. Sure, I broke some rules by picking up a hitchhiker, but I don’t work for that company anymore and they can’t do anything to me. I have nothing to hide.”
He pushed RECORD on the device and set it down on the coffee table next to his book. “All right. What can you tell me about that night?”
“As I recall, I had only been driving long-haul for about a year and was taking a load of mattresses from Texas to a furniture store in Pendleton, Oregon. I got a late start that trip after some trouble at the warehouse, then had some weather delays, so it was probably six or seven by the time I got close to Boise. I was tired, looking to grab something to eat, so I pulled into this truck stop outside Boise.”
“Any chance you remember the name of the place?”
“Of course I do. I only stopped there every time I went through. L.J.’s, about thirty miles outside Boise. I don’t like the big travel centers and always tried to avoid them. You wouldn’t believe the kind of crap that goes down at those places. Pills, girls. Even guys, if you’re into that. Not for me. I liked the smaller, cleaner places, like L.J.’s, where they remember you from week to week and where I didn’t have to deal with the jerks.”
He could only imagine how tough it must have been for a young, attractive woman in the good-old-boy network of truckers.
“Then what?”
“I filled up wit
h gas and walked inside to use the ladies’ room. This woman was in there, washing up at one of the sinks. She had a nasty bruise on her cheek and looked like she had been crying.”
“Do you remember what she was wearing? What she looked like?”
“It’s been years. My memory is a little foggy, I’m afraid. I know she was blonde, a few inches taller than me and probably weighed maybe 120. She had dimples. I remember that, and a scar on her cheek, about an inch long.”
Next to him, he felt Megan sit up straighter. Elizabeth had a scar like that from a playground accident when she was young.
“She seemed real classy, other than maybe she looked like she’d fallen on hard times, you know? Kind of bedraggled and such.”
“Was this the woman you saw?”
He handed over the photograph he had brought along, a large picture of Elizabeth holding a baby in a little pink dress. He assumed it was Cassie. Elizabeth was smiling, but even in the nearly decade-old somewhat grainy image, he thought he could see a certain sadness in her eyes.
Peg McGeary took the picture and studied it for several moments. “Her hair was shorter. Choppy, like she’d taken scissors to it herself, and she looked a bit older than this. But, yeah, I’d say this looks like the same woman. I can’t be a hundred percent sure, you understand. Maybe ninety. I’ve traveled a few miles since then.”
Ninety percent was pretty damn certain.
His spidey senses tingled. “You spoke with her?”
“Not at first. She was still there in the john after I came out of the stall, just standing, staring at the mirror like she was in a fog or something. I asked if she was okay and she looked at me like she didn’t even speak English for about a minute. Funny thing—have you ever seen anybody nod and shake their head at the same time? She did something like that.”
She demonstrated by wiggling her head around, first up and down, then side to side in a gesture of utter indecision. “I guess she couldn’t quite make up her mind how she was. Or maybe she didn’t want to say. I asked her if she was afraid of someone. She didn’t want to answer me for a long time but finally whispered yes. I remember I asked her if she wanted me to take her to the police station. She got really upset about that and said no, she didn’t want to go to the police—she just wanted to get out of Idaho for a while but she didn’t know how.”
Beside him, he could sense Megan’s growing tension as Peg rolled on, oblivious to it.
“A guy I was dating hit me once,” the other woman said. “I ended up kicking him in the balls, pulling a knife on him and threatening worse, then getting the hell out of there. I didn’t look back, not once. I don’t stand for men who hurt women.”
“Neither do I,” Elliot said flatly.
“The lady was so upset, I felt sorry for her. I wanted to help. I’m a sucker that way. I told her where I was going and asked if she wanted to ride with me.”
“She went with you?” Megan asked.
“She seemed real conflicted about it. She started ugly-crying, you know? Big sobs. When she calmed down a little, she said something about how it was probably better for everyone that way, if she was gone. I didn’t know what that meant but she sounded like her mind was made up, so I grabbed us a couple sandwiches and paid for my fuel. Then she climbed into my rig and we headed to Oregon.”
This was huge.
The back of Elliot’s neck prickled like it did when he was closing in on answers. Battling with his tingling instincts was a grim knot of dismay in his chest. How had his dad missed a major tip like this that would have busted the case wide open?
And Cade and Marshall? Their officers should have picked up on this, too. Yes, the tip sheet had been shoved into the wrong file and some of the information didn’t match up exactly, but it was all pretty damn close.
“Did she tell you anything?” Elliot asked. “Why she was on the run? What she might have been afraid of? Why she needed to leave?”
“No. And I’ll admit, after a few miles, I started to think maybe picking her up wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done. Besides the fact it was against company rules and I could have been fired for it, she was acting strange. Real agitated, you know? Kept saying she had made a big mistake. She had to go back. She had to fix things. That sort of thing. I was already behind schedule and didn’t think I could spare the time to go back, but I offered to pull over to let her out or drop her off at the next stop. I wanted her out of my cab at that point. I didn’t need some junkie freaking out on me.”
“A junkie?” Megan asked, features tense. “You think she was on some kind of drugs?”
“Can’t say for sure but she was sure acting like it. All agitated and such.”
Peg sipped at her drink again, forehead furrowed with the effort to remember events from years ago.
“I asked her if she wanted me to stop, and after maybe two or three minutes of fretting like that, she calmed right down like somebody flipped a switch and said no, she didn’t want me to stop. She needed to keep going. It was better for everyone. She said that again. Next thing I knew, she curled up on the seat and fell asleep—the hard kind of sleep, like she hadn’t closed her eyes in months.”
“What did you do?” Elliot asked.
“I was tempted to pull over and dump her at the next truck stop but I didn’t feel right about that. I mean, I didn’t want to take any chance the guy who had messed her up would come looking for her. I didn’t know what to do, so I finally decided to just keep going. I stopped for gas outside Pendleton, Oregon, a few hours later and had to shake her awake to check on her. Took me about five minutes before she opened her eyes. I told her where we were, told her I was heading up to Portland and she was welcome to keep going with me. She said no, she had made a mistake and needed to go back.”
“She said she was going back?” Megan interjected, eyes wide.
“Yeah. She was really upset about it. Crying and everything. Kept saying, ‘What have I done? What have I done?’ I told her I could arrange a ride back Boise way with a trucker I trusted and she said no. She was going to call someone back home to come get her. She thanked me for my help, climbed out of my truck, and that was the last I ever saw her. Right after that, I took a different route for a bit that took me to the East Coast. I didn’t think of the woman again until months later when my route changed again and I made it back to L.J.’s and saw that missing poster.”
This was the part he didn’t want to face, the ugly, uncomfortable truth he would rather tuck back into the files. “You explained all this when you called the Haven Point Police Department?”
“I tried to. The man I talked to was real nice. He took my name and information, then never followed up. I thought he would call me later and he never did. I called again a few weeks later, next time I was passing through, and got the runaround again.”
“Do you remember what you were told by the police department?” Elliot forced himself to ask.
“Like I said, the guy was very nice and said he would keep my information on file. He thanked me for calling but said the timeline didn’t match up and the description I gave didn’t sound like their missing person.”
“But you think otherwise?”
The intensity of Megan’s voice seemed to make the other woman uneasy. “I can’t say for sure it was this Elizabeth Sinclair woman you’re looking for. Like I said, I’m ninety-percent sure. That’s the best I can give you.”
“Thank you. This is very helpful,” Elliot said.
Peg shrugged. “You want my opinion, I think what happened is, she called her knuckle-dragger of a husband to come get her in Pendleton and he was so pissed at her for running away from him that he made sure she couldn’t do it again. I know the type. They can’t stand it when a woman finally says enough.”
She sipped at her drink. “I don’t know if you’ve driven that route, but there are a lot of places between Boi
se and Pendleton where you could dump a body.” She unexpectedly grinned, which he found extremely disconcerting, given the topic of conversation. “But then, maybe I read too many true-crime books by great writers like Elliot Bailey. It’s always the husband.”
Elliot couldn’t look at Megan, though he didn’t need to. He knew she would be biting her lip against the urge to defend her brother.
“You’ve been very helpful,” he said again. “Thank you for agreeing to speak with us.”
“You’re welcome. It’s my pleasure. I really hope I’m wrong. I hope you can find the woman. She struck me as a lost soul, for what it’s worth.”
That was the sense he had gained through the course of this informal investigation, too. Elizabeth had been troubled, just as Megan said in the beginning. “It’s worth a great deal. I think your information will be very valuable to the investigation. Thank you again.”
She gestured to the books. “You can thank me by signing my books. I’ve got two copies of your latest. I’m going to mail it to my mom, since she loves your books, too.”
Feeling awkward and aware every second of Megan beside him and this overwhelming need to tuck her against him and protect her from every ugly possibility, he hurried to sign the copies of his books. When he finished, he reached into his pocket for his wallet and extracted one of his business cards.
“Here’s my contact info. If you remember any more details from that night, please don’t hesitate to reach out.”
“Really? With your cell phone number on it and everything?”
She seemed completely overwhelmed, as if he had handed her a candy bar with Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket inside.
“Anything. The smallest detail you remember could have major value in an investigation like this.”
“I know. I read enough of your books to know how investigations can crack open when you least expect it.”
“That’s right.”
“Let me go get your cute little dog for you,” she said.
The Cottages on Silver Beach Page 20
